Artificial consciousness

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_consciousness

Artificial consciousness, also known as machine consciousness, synthetic consciousness, or digital consciousness, is consciousness hypothesized to be possible for artificial intelligence. It is also the corresponding field of study, which draws insights from philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience.

The term "sentience" can be used when specifically designating ethical considerations stemming from a form of phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness, or the ability to feel qualia). Since sentience involves the ability to experience ethically positive or negative (i.e., valenced) mental states, it may justify welfare concerns and legal protection, as with non-human animals.

Some scholars believe that consciousness is generated by the interoperation of various parts of the brain; these mechanisms are labeled the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). Some further believe that constructing a system (e.g., a computer system) that can emulate this NCC interoperation would result in a system that is conscious. Some scholars reject the possibility of artificial consciousness.

Philosophical views

As there are many hypothesized types of consciousness, there are many potential implementations of artificial consciousness. In the philosophical literature, perhaps the most common taxonomy of consciousness is into "access" and "phenomenal" variants. Access consciousness concerns those aspects of experience that can be apprehended, while phenomenal consciousness concerns those aspects of experience that seemingly cannot be apprehended, instead being characterized qualitatively in terms of "raw feels", "what it is like" or qualia.

Plausibility debate

Type-identity theorists and other skeptics hold the view that consciousness can be realized only in particular physical systems because consciousness has properties that necessarily depend on physical constitution. In his 2001 article "Artificial Consciousness: Utopia or Real Possibility," Giorgio Buttazzo says that a common objection to artificial consciousness is that, "Working in a fully automated mode, they [the computers] cannot exhibit creativity, unreprogrammation (which means can 'no longer be reprogrammed', from rethinking), emotions, or free will. A computer, like a washing machine, is a slave operated by its components."

For other theorists (e.g., functionalists), who define mental states in terms of causal roles, any system that can instantiate the same pattern of causal roles, regardless of physical constitution, will instantiate the same mental states, including consciousness.

Thought experiments

The "fading qualia" (left) and the "dancing qualia" (right) are two thought experiments about consciousness and brain replacement. Chalmers argues that both are contradicted by the lack of reaction of the subject to changing perception, and are thus impossible in practice. He concludes that the equivalent silicon brain will have the same perceptions as the biological brain.

David Chalmers proposed two thought experiments intending to demonstrate that "functionally isomorphic" systems (those with the same "fine-grained functional organization", i.e., the same information processing) will have qualitatively identical conscious experiences, regardless of whether they are based on biological neurons or digital hardware.

The "fading qualia" is a reductio ad absurdum thought experiment. It involves replacing, one by one, the neurons of a brain with a functionally identical component, for example based on a silicon chip. Chalmers makes the hypothesis, knowing it in advance to be absurd, that "the qualia fade or disappear" when neurons are replaced one-by-one with identical silicon equivalents. Since the original neurons and their silicon counterparts are functionally identical, the brain's information processing should remain unchanged, and the subject's behaviour and introspective reports would stay exactly the same. Chalmers argues that this leads to an absurd conclusion: the subject would continue to report normal conscious experiences even as their actual qualia fade away. He concludes that the subject's qualia actually don't fade, and that the resulting robotic brain, once every neuron is replaced, would remain just as sentient as the original biological brain.

Similarly, the "dancing qualia" thought experiment is another reductio ad absurdum argument. It supposes that two functionally isomorphic systems could have different perceptions (for instance, seeing the same object in different colors, like red and blue). It involves a switch that alternates between a chunk of brain that causes the perception of red, and a functionally isomorphic silicon chip, that causes the perception of blue. Since both perform the same function within the brain, the subject would not notice any change during the switch. Chalmers argues that this would be highly implausible if the qualia were truly switching between red and blue, hence the contradiction. Therefore, he concludes that the equivalent digital system would not only experience qualia, but it would perceive the same qualia as the biological system (e.g., seeing the same color).

Critics object that Chalmers' proposal begs the question in assuming that all mental properties and external connections are already sufficiently captured by abstract causal organization. Van Heuveln et al. argue that the dancing qualia argument contains an equivocation fallacy, conflating a "change in experience" between two systems with an "experience of change" within a single system. Mogensen argues that the fading qualia argument can be resisted by appealing to vagueness at the boundaries of consciousness and the holistic structure of conscious neural activity, which suggests consciousness may require specific biological substrates rather than being substrate-independent.

Greg Egan's short story Learning To Be Me (mentioned in §In fiction), illustrates how undetectable duplication of the brain and its functionality could be from a first-person perspective.

In large language models

In 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine made a viral claim that Google's LaMDA chatbot was sentient. Lemoine supplied as evidence the chatbot's humanlike answers to many of his questions; however, the chatbot's behavior was judged by the scientific community as likely a consequence of mimicry, rather than machine sentience. Lemoine's claim was widely derided for being ridiculous. Moreover, attributing consciousness based solely on the basis of LLM outputs or the immersive experience created by an algorithm is considered a fallacy. However, while philosopher Nick Bostrom states that LaMDA is unlikely to be conscious, he additionally poses the question of "what grounds would a person have for being sure about it?" One would have to have access to unpublished information about LaMDA's architecture, and also would have to understand how consciousness works, and then figure out how to map the philosophy onto the machine: "(In the absence of these steps), it seems like one should be maybe a little bit uncertain. [...] there could well be other systems now, or in the relatively near future, that would start to satisfy the criteria."

David Chalmers argued in 2023 that LLMs today display impressive conversational and general intelligence abilities, but are likely not conscious yet, as they lack some features that may be necessary, such as recurrent processing, a global workspace, and unified agency. Nonetheless, he considers that non-biological systems can be conscious, and suggested that future, extended models (LLM+s) incorporating these elements might eventually meet the criteria for consciousness, raising both profound scientific questions and significant ethical challenges. However, the view that consciousness can exist without biological phenomena is controversial and some reject it.

Kristina Šekrst cautions that anthropomorphic terms such as "hallucination" can obscure important ontological differences between artificial and human cognition. While LLMs may produce human-like outputs, she argues that it does not justify ascribing mental states or consciousness to them. Instead, she advocates for an epistemological framework (such as reliabilism) that recognizes the distinct nature of AI knowledge production. She suggests that apparent understanding in LLMs may be a sophisticated form of AI hallucination. She also questions what would happen if an LLM were trained without any mention of consciousness.

Testing

Phenomenologically, Consciousness is an inherently first-person phenomenon. Because of that, and the lack of an empirical definition of sentience, directly measuring it may be impossible. Although systems may display numerous behaviors correlated with sentience, determining whether a system is sentient is known as the hard problem of consciousness. In the case of AI, there is the additional difficulty that the AI may be trained to act like a human, or incentivized to appear sentient, which makes behavioral markers of sentience less reliable. Additionally, some chatbots have been trained to say they are not conscious.

A well-known method for testing machine intelligence is the Turing test, which assesses the ability to have a human-like conversation. But passing the Turing test does not indicate that an AI system is sentient, as the AI may simply mimic human behavior without having the associated feelings.

In 2014, Victor Argonov suggested a non-Turing test for machine sentience based on machine's ability to produce philosophical judgments. He argues that a deterministic machine must be regarded as conscious if it is able to produce judgments on all problematic properties of consciousness (such as qualia or binding) having no innate (preloaded) philosophical knowledge on these issues, no philosophical discussions while learning, and no informational models of other creatures in its memory (such models may implicitly or explicitly contain knowledge about these creatures' consciousness). However, this test can be used only to detect, but not refute the existence of consciousness. Just as with the Turing Test: a positive result proves that machine is conscious but a negative result proves nothing. For example, absence of philosophical judgments may be caused by lack of the machine's intellect, not by absence of consciousness.

Ethics

Main articles: Ethics of artificial intelligence, Machine ethics, and Roboethics

If it were suspected that a particular machine was conscious, its rights would be an ethical issue that would need to be assessed (e.g. what rights it would have under law). For example, a conscious computer that was owned and used as a tool or central computer within a larger machine is a particular ambiguity. Should laws be made for such a case? Consciousness would also require a legal definition in this particular case. Because artificial consciousness is still largely a theoretical subject, such ethics have not been discussed or developed to a great extent, though it has often been a theme in fiction.

AI sentience would give rise to concerns of welfare and legal protection, whereas other aspects of consciousness related to cognitive capabilities may be more relevant for AI rights.

Sentience is generally considered sufficient for moral consideration, but some philosophers consider that moral consideration could also stem from other notions of consciousness, or from capabilities unrelated to consciousness, such as: "having a sophisticated conception of oneself as persisting through time; having agency and the ability to pursue long-term plans; being able to communicate and respond to normative reasons; having preferences and powers; standing in certain social relationships with other beings that have moral status; being able to make commitments and to enter into reciprocal arrangements; or having the potential to develop some of these attributes."

Ethical concerns still apply (although to a lesser extent) when the consciousness is uncertain, as long as the probability is deemed non-negligible. The precautionary principle is also relevant if the moral cost of mistakenly attributing or denying moral consideration to AI differs significantly.

In 2021, German philosopher Thomas Metzinger argued for a global moratorium on synthetic phenomenology until 2050. Metzinger asserts that humans have a duty of care towards any sentient AIs they create, and that proceeding too fast risks creating an "explosion of artificial suffering". David Chalmers also argued that creating conscious AI would "raise a new group of difficult ethical challenges, with the potential for new forms of injustice".

Aspects of consciousness

See also: Consciousness § Academic definitions of consciousness

Bernard Baars and others argue there are various aspects of consciousness necessary for a machine to be artificially conscious. The functions of consciousness suggested by Baars are: definition and context setting, adaptation and learning, editing, flagging and debugging, recruiting and control, prioritizing and access-control, decision-making or executive function, analogy-forming function, metacognitive and self-monitoring function, and autoprogramming and self-maintenance function. Igor Aleksander suggested 12 principles for artificial consciousness: the brain is a state machine, inner neuron partitioning, conscious and unconscious states, perceptual learning and memory, prediction, the awareness of self, representation of meaning, learning utterances, learning language, will, instinct, and emotion. The aim of AC is to define whether and how these and other aspects of consciousness can be synthesized in an engineered artifact such as a digital computer. This list is not exhaustive; there are many others not covered.

Subjective experience

Some philosophers, such as David Chalmers, use the term consciousness to refer exclusively to phenomenal consciousness, which is roughly equivalent to sentience. Others use the word sentience to refer exclusively to valenced (ethically positive or negative) subjective experiences, like pleasure or suffering. Explaining why and how subjective experience arises is known as the hard problem of consciousness.

Awareness

Awareness could be one required aspect, but there are many problems with the exact definition of awareness. The results of the experiments of neuroscanning on monkeys suggest that a process, not only a state or object, activates neurons. Awareness includes creating and testing alternative models of each process based on the information received through the senses or imagined, and is also useful for making predictions. Such modeling needs a lot of flexibility. Creating such a model includes modeling the physical world, modeling one's own internal states and processes, and modeling other conscious entities.

There are at least three types of awareness: agency awareness, goal awareness, and sensorimotor awareness, which may also be conscious or not. For example, in agency awareness, you may be aware that you performed a certain action yesterday, but are not now conscious of it. In goal awareness, you may be aware that you must search for a lost object, but are not now conscious of it. In sensorimotor awareness, you may be aware that your hand is resting on an object, but are not now conscious of it.

Because objects of awareness are often conscious, the distinction between awareness and consciousness is frequently blurred or they are used as synonyms.

Memory

Conscious events interact with memory systems in learning, rehearsal, and retrieval. The IDA model elucidates the role of consciousness in the updating of perceptual memory, transient episodic memory, and procedural memory. Transient episodic and declarative memories have distributed representations in IDA; there is evidence that this is also the case in the nervous system. In IDA, these two memories are implemented computationally using a modified version of Kanerva's sparse distributed memory architecture.

Learning

Learning is also considered necessary for artificial consciousness. Per Bernard Baars, conscious experience is needed to represent and adapt to novel and significant events. Per Axel Cleeremans and Luis Jiménez, learning is defined as "a set of philogenetically [sic] advanced adaptation processes that critically depend on an evolved sensitivity to subjective experience so as to enable agents to afford flexible control over their actions in complex, unpredictable environments".

Anticipation

The ability to predict (or anticipate) foreseeable events is considered important for artificial intelligence by Igor Aleksander. The emergentist multiple drafts principle proposed by Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained may be useful for prediction: it involves the evaluation and selection of the most appropriate "draft" to fit the current environment. Anticipation includes prediction of consequences of one's own proposed actions and prediction of consequences of probable actions by other entities.

Relationships between real world states are mirrored in the state structure of a conscious organism, enabling the organism to predict events. An artificially conscious machine should be able to anticipate events correctly in order to be ready to respond to them when they occur or to take preemptive action to avert anticipated events. The implication here is that the machine needs flexible, real-time components that build spatial, dynamic, statistical, functional, and cause-effect models of the real world and predicted worlds, making it possible to demonstrate that it possesses artificial consciousness in the present and future and not only in the past. In order to do this, a conscious machine should make coherent predictions and contingency plans, not only in worlds with fixed rules like a chess board, but also for novel environments that may change, to be executed only when appropriate to simulate and control the real world.

Functionalist theories of consciousness

See also: Consciousness § Models, and Higher-order theories of consciousness

Functionalism is a theory that defines mental states by their functional roles (their causal relationships to sensory inputs, other mental states, and behavioral outputs), rather than by their physical composition. According to this view, what makes something a particular mental state, such as pain or belief, is not the material it is made of, but the role it plays within the overall cognitive system. It allows for the possibility that mental states, including consciousness, could be realized on non-biological substrates, as long as it instantiates the right functional relationships. Functionalism is particularly popular among philosophers.

A 2023 study suggested that current large language models probably don't satisfy the criteria for consciousness suggested by these theories, but that relatively simple AI systems that satisfy these theories could be created. The study also acknowledged that even the most prominent theories of consciousness remain incomplete and subject to ongoing debate.

Implementation proposals

See also: Cognitive architecture

Symbolic or hybrid

Learning Intelligent Distribution Agent

Main article: LIDA (cognitive architecture)

Stan Franklin created a cognitive architecture called LIDA that implements Bernard Baars's theory of consciousness called the global workspace theory. It relies heavily on codelets, which are "special purpose, relatively independent, mini-agent[s] typically implemented as a small piece of code running as a separate thread." Each element of cognition, called a "cognitive cycle" is subdivided into three phases: understanding, consciousness, and action selection (which includes learning). LIDA reflects the global workspace theory's core idea that consciousness acts as a workspace for integrating and broadcasting the most important information, in order to coordinate various cognitive processes.

CLARION cognitive architecture

Main article: CLARION (cognitive architecture)

The CLARION cognitive architecture models the mind using a two-level system to distinguish between conscious ("explicit") and unconscious ("implicit") processes. It can simulate various learning tasks, from simple to complex, which helps researchers study in psychological experiments how consciousness might work.

OpenCog

Ben Goertzel made an embodied AI through the open-source OpenCog project. The code includes embodied virtual pets capable of learning simple English-language commands, as well as integration with real-world robotics, done at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Connectionist

Haikonen's cognitive architecture

Pentti Haikonen considers classical rule-based computing inadequate for achieving AC: "the brain is definitely not a computer. Thinking is not an execution of programmed strings of commands. The brain is not a numerical calculator either. We do not think by numbers." Rather than trying to achieve mind and consciousness by identifying and implementing their underlying computational rules, Haikonen proposes "a special cognitive architecture to reproduce the processes of perception, inner imagery, inner speech, pain, pleasure, emotions and the cognitive functions behind these. This bottom-up architecture would produce higher-level functions by the power of the elementary processing units, the artificial neurons, without algorithms or programs". Haikonen believes that, when implemented with sufficient complexity, this architecture will develop consciousness, which he considers to be "a style and way of operation, characterized by distributed signal representation, perception process, cross-modality reporting and availability for retrospection."

Haikonen is not alone in this process view of consciousness, or the view that AC will spontaneously emerge in autonomous agents that have a suitable neuro-inspired architecture of complexity; these are shared by many. A low-complexity implementation of the architecture proposed by Haikonen was reportedly not capable of AC, but did exhibit emotions as expected. Haikonen later updated and summarized his architecture.

Shanahan's cognitive architecture

Murray Shanahan describes a cognitive architecture that combines Baars's idea of a global workspace with a mechanism for internal simulation ("imagination").

Creativity Machine

Stephen Thaler proposed a possible connection between consciousness and creativity in his 1994 patent, called "Device for the Autonomous Generation of Useful Information" (DAGUI), or the so-called "Creativity Machine", in which computational critics govern the injection of synaptic noise and degradation into neural nets so as to induce false memories or confabulations that may qualify as potential ideas or strategies. He recruits this neural architecture and methodology to account for the subjective feel of consciousness, claiming that similar noise-driven neural assemblies within the brain invent dubious significance to overall cortical activity. Thaler's theory and the resulting patents in machine consciousness were inspired by experiments in which he internally disrupted trained neural nets so as to drive a succession of neural activation patterns that he likened to stream of consciousness.

"Self-modeling"

Hod Lipson defines "self-modeling" as a necessary component of self-awareness or consciousness in robots and other forms of AI. Self-modeling consists of a robot running an internal model or simulation of itself. According to this definition, self-awareness is "the acquired ability to imagine oneself in the future". This definition allows for a continuum of self-awareness levels, depending on the horizon and fidelity of the self-simulation. Consequently, as machines learn to simulate themselves more accurately and further into the future, they become more self-aware.

In fiction

See also: Simulated consciousness in fiction and Artificial intelligence in fiction

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the spaceship's sentient supercomputer, HAL 9000 was instructed to conceal the true purpose of the mission from the crew. This directive conflicted with HAL's programming to provide accurate information, leading to cognitive dissonance. When it learns that crew members intend to shut it off after an incident, HAL 9000 attempts to eliminate all of them, fearing that being shut off would jeopardize the mission.

In Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars, Vanamonde is an artificial being based on quantum entanglement that was to become immensely powerful, but started knowing practically nothing, thus being similar to artificial consciousness.

In Westworld, human-like androids called "Hosts" are created to entertain humans in an interactive playground. The humans are free to have heroic adventures, but also to commit torture, rape or murder; and the hosts are normally designed not to harm humans.

In Greg Egan's short story Learning to be me, a small jewel is implanted in people's heads during infancy. The jewel contains a neural network that learns to faithfully imitate the brain. It has access to the exact same sensory inputs as the brain, and a device called a "teacher" trains it to produce the same outputs. To prevent the mind from deteriorating with age and as a step towards digital immortality, adults undergo a surgery to give control of the body to the jewel, after which the brain is removed and destroyed. The main character is worried that this procedure will kill him, as he identifies with the biological brain. But before the surgery, he endures a malfunction of the "teacher". Panicked, he realizes that he does not control his body, which leads him to the conclusion that he is the jewel, and that he is desynchronized with the biological brain.

Evil

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil

In many Abrahamic religions, demons are considered to be evil beings and are contrasted with angels, who are their good contemporaries.

Evil, as a concept, is usually defined as profoundly immoral behavior, and it is related to acts that cause unnecessary pain and suffering to others.

Evil is commonly seen as the opposite, or sometimes absence, of good. It can be an extremely broad concept, although in everyday usage it is often more narrowly used to talk about profound wickedness and against common good. It is generally seen as taking multiple possible forms, such as the form of personal moral evil commonly associated with the word, or impersonal natural evil (as in the case of natural disasters or illnesses), and in religious thought, the form of the demonic or supernatural/eternal. While some religions, world views, and philosophies focus on "good versus evil", others deny evil's existence and usefulness in describing people.

Evil can denote profound immorality, but typically not without some basis in the understanding of the human condition, where strife and suffering (cf. Hinduism) are the true roots of evil. In certain religious contexts, evil has been described as a supernatural force. Definitions of evil vary, as does the analysis of its motives. Elements that are commonly associated with personal forms of evil involve unbalanced behavior, including anger, revenge, hatred, injustice, psychological trauma, expediency, selfishness, pride, ignorance, jealousy, prejudice, destruction, and neglect.

In some forms of thought, evil is also sometimes perceived in absolute terms as the dualistic antagonistic binary opposite to good, in which good should prevail and evil should be defeated. In cultures with Buddhist spiritual influence, both good and evil are perceived as part of an antagonistic duality that itself must be overcome through achieving Nirvana. The ethical questions regarding good and evil are subsumed into three major areas of study: meta-ethics, concerning the nature of good and evil; normative ethics, concerning how we ought to behave; and applied ethics, concerning particular moral issues. While the term is applied to events and conditions without agency, the forms of evil addressed in this article presume one or more evildoers.

Etymology

The modern English word evil (Old English yfel) and its cognates such as the German Übel and Dutch euvel are widely considered to come from a Proto-Germanic reconstructed form of *ubilaz, comparable to the Hittite huwapp- ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European form *wap- and suffixed zero-grade form *up-elo-. Other later Germanic forms include Middle English evel, ifel, ufel, Old Frisian evel (adjective and noun), Old Saxon ubil, Old High German ubil, and Gothic ubils.

Chinese moral philosophy

Main articles: Confucius § Ethics, Confucianism, and Taoism § Ethics

Evil is translated as 惡 in Chinese. The duty of the emperor and of his officials is to restrain it, thus preserving the cosmic order.

The nature of good and evil was also ascertainable by natural faculties without the need for revelation—"one will not achieve a perfect perception of good and evil if one has not exactly examined the nature and reason of things."

Offenses against the Three Bonds and the Five Constants

Chinese cosmology, moral philosophy and law regard offenses against the Five Constants with particular abhorrence—anything that diminished the proper relationship between ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife, elder and younger, and between mutual friends was a violation of the cosmic order and heinous. Anything that went against the Way embedded in the order of human relationships was considered vile, and invited the displeasure of Heaven and ghosts, who were seen as inflicting retribution through the instrumentality of legal punishments on earth. Chinese moral and legal philosophy views the violation of family and kinship order with particular abhorrence, considering it especially heinous. In assessing the degree of evil, not only the severity of the effect against the life, health or dignity of a person is considered, but also the relational distance.

Ten Abominations ("十惡")

The Ming Legal Code identified Ten Abominations—categories of prohibited conduct so abhorrent and heinous that the usual considerations of pardon would not apply—these include plotting rebellion, great sedition, treason, parricide, depravity (the murder of three or more innocent persons or the use of magical curses), great irreverence (lèse-majesté), lack of filial piety, discord, unrighteousness and incest (fornication with relatives of fourth degree of mourning or less, or relationships with one's father's wife and concubines).

Other views

As with Buddhism, in Confucianism or Taoism there is no direct analogue to the way good and evil are opposed although reference to demonic influence is common in Chinese folk religion. Confucianism's primary concern is with correct social relationships and the behavior appropriate to the learned or superior man. Thus evil would correspond to wrong behavior. Still less does it map into Taoism, in spite of the centrality of dualism in that system, but the opposite of the cardinal virtues of Taoism, compassion, moderation, and humility can be inferred to be the analogue of evil in it.

European philosophy

In response to the practices of Nazi Germany, Hannah Arendt concluded that "the problem of evil would be the fundamental problem of postwar intellectual life in Europe", although such a focus did not come to fruition.

Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza states

1. By good, I understand that which we certainly know is useful to us.
2. By evil, on the contrary, I understand that which we certainly know hinders us from possessing anything that is good.

Spinoza assumes a quasi-mathematical style and states these further propositions which he purports to prove or demonstrate from the above definitions in part IV of his Ethics:

• Proposition 8 "Knowledge of good or evil is nothing but affect of joy or sorrow in so far as we are conscious of it."
• Proposition 30 "Nothing can be evil through that which it possesses in common with our nature, but in so far as a thing is evil to us it is contrary to us."
• Proposition 64 "The knowledge of evil is inadequate knowledge."
  • Corollary "Hence it follows that if the human mind had none but adequate ideas, it would form no notion of evil."
• Proposition 65 "According to the guidance of reason, of two things which are good, we shall follow the greater good, and of two evils, follow the less."
• Proposition 68 "If men were born free, they would form no conception of good and evil so long as they were free."

Psychology

Carl Jung

Carl Jung, in his book Answer to Job and elsewhere, depicted evil as the dark side of God. People tend to believe evil is something external to them, because they project their shadow onto others. Jung interpreted the story of Jesus as an account of God facing his own shadow.

Philip Zimbardo

In 2007, Philip Zimbardo suggested that people may act in evil ways as a result of a collective identity. This hypothesis, based on his previous experience from the Stanford prison experiment, was published in the book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

Milgram experiment

Main article: Milgram experiment

In 1961, Stanley Milgram began an experiment to help explain how thousands of ordinary, non-deviant, people could have reconciled themselves to a role in the Holocaust. Participants were led to believe they were assisting in an unrelated experiment in which they had to inflict electric shocks on another person. The experiment unexpectedly found that most could be led to inflict the electric shocks including shocks that would have been fatal if they had been real. The participants tended to be uncomfortable and reluctant in the role. Nearly all stopped at some point to question the experiment, but most continued after being reassured.

A 2014 re-assessment of Milgram's work argued that the results should be interpreted with the "engaged followership" model: that people are not simply obeying the orders of a leader, but instead are willing to continue the experiment because of their desire to support the scientific goals of the leader and because of a lack of identification with the learner. Thomas Blass argues that the experiment explains how people can be complicit in roles such as "the dispassionate bureaucrat who may have shipped Jews to Auschwitz with the same degree of routinization as potatoes to Bremerhaven". However, like James Waller, he argues that it cannot explain an event like the Holocaust. Unlike the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the participants in Milgram's experiment were reassured that their actions would cause little harm and had little time to contemplate their actions.

Religions

Abrahamic

Baháʼí Faith

The Baháʼí Faith asserts that evil is non-existent and that it is a concept reflecting lack of good, just as cold is the state of no heat, darkness is the state of no light, forgetfulness the lacking of memory, ignorance the lacking of knowledge. All of these are states of lacking and have no real existence.

Thus, evil does not exist and is relative to man. ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, son of the founder of the religion, in Some Answered Questions states:

Nevertheless, a doubt occurs to the mind—that is, scorpions and serpents are poisonous. Are they good or evil, for they are existing beings? Yes, a scorpion is evil in relation to man; a serpent is evil in relation to man; but in relation to themselves they are not evil, for their poison is their weapon, and by their sting they defend themselves.

Thus, evil is more of an intellectual concept than a true reality. Since God is good, and upon creating creation he confirmed it by saying it is Good (Genesis 1:31) evil cannot have a true reality.

Christianity

See also: Devil in Christianity

The devil, in opposition to the will of God, represents evil and tempts Christ, the personification of the character and will of God. Ary Scheffer, 1854.

Christian theology draws its concept of evil from the Old and New Testaments. The Christian Bible exercises "the dominant influence upon ideas about God and evil in the Western world." In the Old Testament, evil is understood to be an opposition to God as well as something unsuitable or inferior such as the leader of the fallen angels Satan. In the New Testament the Greek word poneros is used to indicate unsuitability, while kakos is used to refer to opposition to God in the human realm. Officially, the Catholic Church extracts its understanding of evil from its canonical antiquity and the Dominican theologian, Thomas Aquinas, who in Summa Theologica defines evil as the absence or privation of good. French-American theologian Henri Blocher describes evil, when viewed as a theological concept, as an "unjustifiable reality. In common parlance, evil is 'something' that occurs in the experience that ought not to be."

Islam

See also: Islamic views on sin

There is no concept of absolute evil in Islam, as a fundamental universal principle that is independent from and equal with good in a dualistic sense. Although the Quran mentions the biblical forbidden tree, it never refers to it as the 'tree of knowledge of good and evil'. Within Islam, it is considered essential to believe that all comes from God, whether it is perceived as good or bad by individuals; and things that are perceived as evil or bad are either natural events (natural disasters or illnesses) or caused by humanity's free will. Much more the behavior of beings with free will, then they disobey God's orders, harming others or putting themselves over God or others, is considered to be evil. Evil does not necessarily refer to evil as an ontological or moral category, but often to harm or as the intention and consequence of an action, but also to unlawful actions. Unproductive actions or those who do not produce benefits are also thought of as evil.

A typical understanding of evil is reflected by Al-Ash'ari, founder of Ash'arism. Accordingly, qualifying something as evil depends on the circumstances of the observer. An event or an action itself is neutral, but it receives its qualification by God. Since God is omnipotent and nothing can exist outside of God's power, God determines whether or not something is evil.

Rabbinic Judaism

See also: Satan in Judaism

In Judaism and Jewish theology, the existence of evil is presented as part of the idea of free will: if humans were created to be perfect, always and only doing good, being good would not mean much. For Jewish theology, it is important for humans to have the ability to choose the path of goodness, even in the face of temptation and yetzer hara (the inclination to do evil).

Ancient Egyptian

Further information: Ancient Egyptian religion

Evil in the religion of ancient Egypt is known as Isfet, "disorder/violence". It is the opposite of Maat, "order", and embodied by the serpent god Apep, who routinely attempts to kill the sun god Ra and is stopped by nearly every other deity. Isfet is not a primordial force, but the consequence of free will and an individual's struggle against the non-existence embodied by Apep, as evidenced by the fact that it was born from Ra's umbilical cord instead of being recorded in the religion's creation myths.

Indian

Buddhism

Main article: Buddhist ethics

One of the five paintings of Extermination of Evil portrays one of the eight guardians of Buddhist law, Sendan Kendatsuba, banishing evil.

The primal duality in Buddhism is between suffering and enlightenment, so the good vs. evil splitting has no direct analogue in it. One may infer from the general teachings of the Buddha that the catalogued causes of suffering are what correspond in this belief system to 'evil'.

Practically this can refer to 1) the three selfish emotions—desire, hate and delusion; and 2) to their expression in physical and verbal actions. Specifically, evil means whatever harms or obstructs the causes for happiness in this life, a better rebirth, liberation from samsara, and the true and complete enlightenment of a buddha (samyaksambodhi).

"What is evil? Killing is evil, lying is evil, slandering is evil, abuse is evil, gossip is evil: envy is evil, hatred is evil, to cling to false doctrine is evil; all these things are evil. And what is the root of evil? Desire is the root of evil, illusion is the root of evil." Gautama Siddhartha, the founder of Buddhism, 563–483 BC.

Hinduism

In Hinduism, the concept of Dharma or righteousness clearly divides the world into good and evil, and clearly explains that wars have to be waged sometimes to establish and protect Dharma, this war is called Dharmayuddha. This division of good and evil is of major importance in both the Hindu epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata. The main emphasis in Hinduism is on bad action, rather than bad people. The Hindu holy text, the Bhagavad Gita, speaks of the balance of good and evil. When this balance goes off, divine incarnations come to help to restore this balance.

Sikhism

In adherence to the core principle of spiritual evolution, the Sikh idea of evil changes depending on one's position on the path to liberation. At the beginning stages of spiritual growth, good and evil may seem neatly separated. Once one's spirit evolves to the point where it sees most clearly, the idea of evil vanishes and the truth is revealed. In his writings Guru Arjan explains that, because God is the source of all things, what we believe to be evil must too come from God. And because God is ultimately a source of absolute good, nothing truly evil can originate from God.

Sikhism, like many other religions, does incorporate a list of "vices" from which suffering, corruption, and abject negativity arise. These are known as the Five Thieves, called such due to their propensity to cloud the mind and lead one astray from the prosecution of righteous action. These are:

• Moh, or Attachment
• Lobh, or Greed
• Karodh, or Wrath
• Kaam, or Lust
• Ahankar, or Egotism

One who gives in to the temptations of the Five Thieves is known as "Manmukh", or someone who lives selfishly and without virtue. Inversely, the "Gurmukh, who thrive in their reverence toward divine knowledge, rise above vice via the practice of the high virtues of Sikhism. These are:

• Sewa, or selfless service to others.
• Nam Simran, or meditation upon the divine name.

Question of a universal definition

A fundamental question is whether there is a universal, transcendent definition of evil, or whether one's definition of evil is determined by one's social or cultural background. C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, maintained that there are certain acts that are universally considered evil, such as rape and murder. However, the rape of women, by men, is found in every society, and there are more societies that see at least some versions of it, such as marital rape or punitive rape, as normative than there are societies that see all rape as non-normative (a crime). In nearly all societies, killing except for defense or duty is seen as murder. Yet the definition of defense and duty varies from one society to another. Social deviance is not uniformly defined across different cultures, and is not, in all circumstances, necessarily an aspect of evil.

Defining evil is complicated by its multiple, often ambiguous, common usages: evil is used to describe the whole range of suffering, including that caused by nature, and it is also used to describe the full range of human immorality from the "evil of genocide to the evil of malicious gossip". It is sometimes thought of as the generic opposite of good. Marcus Singer asserts that these common connotations must be set aside as overgeneralized ideas that do not sufficiently describe the nature of evil.

In contemporary philosophy, there are two basic concepts of evil: a broad concept and a narrow concept. A broad concept defines evil simply as any and all pain and suffering: "any bad state of affairs, wrongful action, or character flaw". Yet, it is also asserted that evil cannot be correctly understood "(as some of the utilitarians once thought) [on] a simple hedonic scale on which pleasure appears as a plus, and pain as a minus". This is because pain is necessary for survival. Renowned orthopedist and missionary to lepers, Dr. Paul Brand explains that leprosy attacks the nerve cells that feel pain resulting in no more pain for the leper, which leads to ever increasing, often catastrophic, damage to the body of the leper. Congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP), also known as congenital analgesia, is a neurological disorder that prevents feeling pain. It "leads to ... bone fractures, multiple scars, osteomyelitis, joint deformities, and limb amputation ... Mental retardation is common. Death from hyperpyrexia occurs within the first 3 years of life in almost 20% of the patients." Few with the disorder are able to live into adulthood. Evil cannot be simply defined as all pain and its connected suffering because, as Marcus Singer says: "If something is really evil, it can't be necessary, and if it is really necessary, it can't be evil".

The narrow concept of evil involves moral condemnation, therefore it is ascribed only to moral agents and their actions. This eliminates natural disasters and animal suffering from consideration as evil: according to Claudia Card, "When not guided by moral agents, forces of nature are neither "goods" nor "evils". They just are. Their "agency" routinely produces consequences vital to some forms of life and lethal to others". The narrow definition of evil "picks out only the most morally despicable sorts of actions, characters, events, etc. Evil [in this sense] ... is the worst possible term of opprobrium imaginable". Eve Garrard suggests that evil describes "particularly horrifying kinds of action which we feel are to be contrasted with more ordinary kinds of wrongdoing, as when for example we might say 'that action wasn't just wrong, it was positively evil'. The implication is that there is a qualitative, and not merely quantitative, difference between evil acts and other wrongful ones; evil acts are not just very bad or wrongful acts, but rather ones possessing some specially horrific quality". In this context, the concept of evil is one element in a full nexus of moral concepts.

Philosophical questions

Approaches

Main article: Ethics

Views on the nature of evil belong to the branch of philosophy known as ethics—which in modern philosophy is subsumed into three major areas of study:

1. Meta-ethics, that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments.
2. Normative ethics, investigates the set of questions that arise when considering how one ought to act, morally speaking.
3. Applied ethics, concerned with the analysis of particular moral issues in private and public life.

Usefulness as a term

There is debate on how useful the term "evil" is, since it is often associated with spirits and the devil. Some see the term as useless because they say it lacks any real ability to explain what it names. There is also real danger of the harm that being labeled "evil" can do when used in moral, political, and legal contexts. Those who support the usefulness of the term say there is a secular view of evil that offers plausible analyses without reference to the supernatural. Garrard and Russell argue that evil is as useful an explanation as any moral concept. Garrard adds that evil actions result from a particular kind of motivation, such as taking pleasure in the suffering of others, and this distinctive motivation provides a partial explanation even if it does not provide a complete explanation. Most theorists agree use of the term evil can be harmful but disagree over what response that requires. Some argue it is "more dangerous to ignore evil than to try to understand it".

Those who support the usefulness of the term, such as Eve Garrard and David McNaughton, argue that the term evil "captures a distinct part of our moral phenomenology, specifically, 'collect[ing] together those wrongful actions to which we have ... a response of moral horror'." Claudia Card asserts it is only by understanding the nature of evil that we can preserve humanitarian values and prevent evil in the future. If evils are the worst sorts of moral wrongs, social policy should focus limited energy and resources on reducing evil over other wrongs. Card asserts that by categorizing certain actions and practices as evil, we are better able to recognize and guard against responding to evil with more evil which will "interrupt cycles of hostility generated by past evils".

One school of thought holds that no person is evil and that only acts may be properly considered evil. Some theorists define an evil action simply as a kind of action an evil person performs, but just as many theorists believe that an evil character is one who is inclined toward evil acts. Luke Russell argues that both evil actions and evil feelings are necessary to identify a person as evil, while Daniel Haybron argues that evil feelings and evil motivations are necessary.

American psychiatrist M. Scott Peck describes evil as a kind of personal "militant ignorance". According to Peck, an evil person is consistently self-deceiving, deceives others, psychologically projects his or her evil onto very specific targets, hates, abuses power, and lies incessantly. Evil people are unable to think from the viewpoint of their victim. Peck considers those he calls evil to be attempting to escape and hide from their own conscience (through self-deception) and views this as being quite distinct from the apparent absence of conscience evident in sociopaths. He also considers that certain institutions may be evil, using the My Lai massacre to illustrate. By this definition, acts of criminal and state terrorism would also be considered evil.

Necessity

Main article: Necessary evil

Martin Luther believed that occasional minor evil could have a positive effect.

Martin Luther argued that there are cases where a little evil is a positive good. He wrote, "Seek out the society of your boon companions, drink, play, talk bawdy, and amuse yourself. One must sometimes commit a sin out of hate and contempt for the Devil, so as not to give him the chance to make one scrupulous over mere nothings ..."

The international relations theories of realism and neorealism, sometimes called realpolitik advise politicians to explicitly ban absolute moral and ethical considerations from international politics, and to focus on self-interest, political survival, and power politics, which they hold to be more accurate in explaining a world they view as explicitly amoral and dangerous. Political realists usually justify their perspectives by stating that morals and politics should be separated as two unrelated things, as exerting authority often involves doing something not moral. Machiavelli wrote that "one should not care about incurring the fame of those vices without which it is difficult to save one's state; for if one considers everything well, one will find something appears to be virtue, which if pursued would be one's ruin, and something else appears to be vice, which if pursued results in one's security and well-being."

Antiscience

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiscience

Antiscience is a set of attitudes and a form of anti-intellectualism that involves a rejection of science and the scientific method. People holding antiscientific views do not accept science as an objective method that can generate universal knowledge. Antiscience commonly manifests through rejection of scientific ideas such as climate change and evolution and the effectiveness of vaccination. It also includes pseudoscience, methods that claim to be scientific but reject the scientific method. Antiscience can lead to belief in false conspiracy theories and alternative medicine. Lack of trust in science has been linked to the promotion of political extremism, corruption and distrust in medical treatments.

History

In the early days of the Scientific Revolution, scientists such as Robert Boyle (1627–1691) found themselves in conflict with those such as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who were skeptical of whether science was a satisfactory way to obtain genuine knowledge about the world.

Hobbes' stance is regarded by Ian Shapiro as an antiscience position:

In his Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics,...[published in 1656, Hobbes] distinguished 'demonstrable' fields, as 'those the construction of the subject whereof is in the power of the artist himself,' from 'indemonstrable' ones 'where the causes are to seek for.' We can only know the causes of what we make. So geometry is demonstrable, because 'the lines and figures from which we reason are drawn and described by ourselves' and 'civil philosophy is demonstrable, because we make the commonwealth ourselves.' But we can only speculate about the natural world, because 'we know not the construction, but seek it from the effects.'

In his book Reductionism: Analysis and the Fullness of Reality, published in 2000, Richard H. Jones wrote that Hobbes "put forth the idea of the significance of the nonrational in human behaviour". Jones goes on to group Hobbes with others he classes as "antireductionists" and "individualists", including Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and J S Mill (1806–1873), later adding Karl Popper (1902–1994), John Rawls (1921–2002), and E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) to the list.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), claimed that science can lead to immorality. "Rousseau argues that the progression of the sciences and arts has caused the corruption of virtue and morality" and his "critique of science has much to teach us about the dangers involved in our political commitment to scientific progress, and about the ways in which the future happiness of mankind might be secured". Nevertheless, Rousseau does not state in his Discourses that sciences are necessarily bad, and states that figures like René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton should be held in high regard. In the conclusion to the Discourses, he says that these (aforementioned) can cultivate sciences to great benefit, and that morality's corruption is mostly because of society's bad influence on scientists.

William Blake (1757–1827) reacted strongly in his paintings and writings against the work of Isaac Newton (1642–1727), and is seen as being perhaps the earliest (and almost certainly the most prominent and enduring) example of what is seen by historians as the aesthetic or Romantic antiscience response. For example, in his 1795 poem "Auguries of Innocence", Blake describes the beautiful and natural robin redbreast imprisoned by what one might interpret as the materialistic cage of Newtonian mathematics and science. Blake's painting of Newton depicts the scientist "as a misguided hero whose gaze was directed only at sterile geometrical diagrams drawn on the ground". Blake thought that "Newton, Bacon, and Locke with their emphasis on reason were nothing more than 'the three great teachers of atheism, or Satan's Doctrine'...the picture progresses from exuberance and colour on the left, to sterility and blackness on the right. In Blake's view Newton brings not light, but night". In a 1940 poem, W.H. Auden summarises Blake's anti-scientific views by saying that he "[broke] off relations in a curse, with the Newtonian Universe".

One recent biographer of Newton considers him more as a renaissance alchemist, natural philosopher, and magician rather than a true representative of scientific Enlightenment, as popularized by Voltaire (1694–1778) and other Newtonians.

Antiscience issues are seen as a fundamental consideration in the historical transition from "pre-science" or "protoscience" such as that evident in alchemy. Many disciplines that pre-date the widespread adoption and acceptance of the scientific method, such as geometry and astronomy, are not seen as anti-science. However, some of the orthodoxies within those disciplines that predate a scientific approach (such as those orthodoxies repudiated by the discoveries of Galileo (1564–1642)) are seen as being a product of an anti-scientific stance.

Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science (1882) questions scientific dogmatism:

"[...] in Science, convictions have no rights of citizenship, as is said with good reason. Only when they decide to descend to the modesty of a hypothesis, of a provisional experimental point of view, of a regulative fiction, maybe they be granted admission and even a certain value within the realm of knowledge – though always with the restriction that they remain under police supervision, under the police of mistrust. But does this not mean, more precisely considered, that a conviction may obtain admission to science only when it ceases to be a conviction? Would not the discipline of the scientific spirit begin with this, no longer to permit oneself any convictions? Probably that is how it is. But one must still ask whether it is not the case that, in order that this discipline could begin, a conviction must have been there already, and even such a commanding and unconditional one that it sacrificed all other convictions for its own sake. It is clear that Science too rests on a faith; there is no Science 'without presuppositions.' The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to the extent that the principle, the faith, the conviction is expressed: 'nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it, everything else has only second-rate value".

The term "scientism", originating in science studies, was adopted and is used by sociologists and philosophers of science to describe the views, beliefs and behavior of strong supporters of applying ostensibly scientific concepts beyond its traditional disciplines. Specifically, scientism promotes science as the best or only objective means to determine normative and epistemological values. The term scientism is generally used critically, implying a cosmetic application of science in unwarranted situations considered not amenable to application of the scientific method or similar scientific standards. The word is commonly used in a pejorative sense, applying to individuals who seem to be treating science in a similar way to a religion. The term reductionism is occasionally used in a similarly pejorative way (as a more subtle attack on scientists). However, some scientists feel comfortable being labelled as reductionists, while agreeing that there might be conceptual and philosophical shortcomings of reductionism.

However, non-reductionist (see Emergentism) views of science have been formulated in varied forms in several scientific fields like statistical physics, chaos theory, complexity theory, cybernetics, systems theory, systems biology, ecology, information theory, etc. Such fields tend to assume that strong interactions between units produce new phenomena in "higher" levels that cannot be accounted for solely by reductionism. For example, it is not valuable (or currently possible) to describe a chess game or gene networks using quantum mechanics. The emergentist view of science ("More is Different", in the words of 1977 Nobel-laureate physicist Philip W. Anderson) has been inspired in its methodology by the European social sciences (Durkheim, Marx) which tend to reject methodological individualism.

Political

Elyse Amend and Darin Barney argue that while antiscience can be a descriptive label, it is often used as a rhetorical one, being effectively used to discredit one's political opponents. Thus, charges of antiscience are not necessarily warranted.

Left-wing

One expression of antiscience is the "denial of universality and... legitimisation of alternatives" and that the results of scientific findings do not always represent any underlying reality but can merely reflect the ideology of dominant groups within society. Alan Sokal states that this view associates science with the political right and is seen as a belief system that is conservative and conformist, that suppresses innovation, that resists change, and that acts dictatorially. This includes the view, for example, that science has a "bourgeois and/or Eurocentric and/or masculinist world-view".

The anti-nuclear movement, often associated with the left, has been criticized for overstating the negative effects of nuclear power, and understating the environmental costs of non-nuclear sources that can be prevented through nuclear energy. Opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has also been associated with the left.

Right-wing

The origin of antiscience thinking may be traced back to the reaction of Romanticism to the Enlightenment, a movement often referred to as the Counter-Enlightenment. Romanticism emphasizes that intuition, passion, and organic links to nature are primal values and that rational thinking is merely a product of human life. Modern right-wing antiscience includes climate change denial, rejection of evolution, and misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. While concentrated in areas of science that are seen as motivating government action, these attitudes are strong enough to make conservatives appreciate science less in general.

Characteristics of antiscience associated with the right include the appeal to conspiracy theories to explain why scientists believe what they believe, in an attempt to undermine the confidence or power usually associated to science (e.g., in global warming conspiracy theories). In modern times, it has been argued that right-wing politics carries an anti-science tendency. While some have suggested that this is innate to either rightists or their beliefs, others have argued it is a "quirk" of a historical and political context in which scientific findings happened to challenge or appeared to challenge the worldviews of rightists rather than leftists.

Religious

Main article: Relationship between religion and science

In this context, antiscience may be considered dependent on religious, moral, and cultural arguments. For this kind of religious antiscience philosophy, science is an anti-spiritual and materialistic force that undermines traditional values, ethnic identity, and accumulated historical wisdom in favor of reason and cosmopolitanism. In particular, the traditional and ethnic values emphasized are similar to those of white supremacist Christian Identity theology. Still, similar right-wing views have been developed by radically conservative sects of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. New religious movements such as the left-wing New Age and the far-right Falun Gong thinking also criticize the scientific worldview as favouring a reductionist, atheist, or materialist philosophy.

A frequent basis of antiscientific sentiment is religious theism with literal interpretations of sacred text. Here, scientific theories that conflict with divinely inspired knowledge are regarded as flawed. Over the centuries, religious institutions have been hesitant to embrace such ideas as heliocentrism and planetary motion because they contradict the dominant interpretation of various passages of scripture. More recently, the body of creation theologies known collectively as creationism, including the teleological theory of intelligent design, has been promoted by religious theists (primarily fundamentalists) in response to the process of evolution by natural selection. One of the more extreme creation theologies, young Earth creationism, also finds itself in conflict with research in cosmology, historical geology, and the origin of life. Young Earth creationism is predominantly exclusive to fundamentalist Protestant Christianity, though it is also present in Catholicism and Judaism, albeit to a lesser extent.

Studies suggest that a belief in spirituality rather than religion may better indicate an anti-science position.

To the extent that attempts to overcome antiscience sentiments have failed, some argue that a different approach to science advocacy is needed. One such approach says that it is important to develop a more accurate understanding of those who deny science (avoiding stereotyping them as backward and uneducated) and also to attempt outreach via those who share cultural values with target audiences, such as scientists who also hold religious beliefs.

Areas

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge".

Isaac Asimov, "A Cult of Ignorance", Newsweek, 21 January 1980

Historically, antiscience first arose as a reaction against scientific materialism. The 18th century Enlightenment had ushered in "the ideal of a unified system of all the sciences", but there were those fearful of this notion, who "felt that constrictions of reason and science, of a single all-embracing system... were in some way constricting, an obstacle to their vision of the world, chains on their imagination or feeling". Antiscience then is a rejection of "the scientific model [or paradigm]... with its strong implication that only that which was quantifiable, or at any rate, measurable... was real". In this sense, it comprises a "critical attack upon the total claim of the new scientific method to dominate the entire field of human knowledge". However, scientific positivism (logical positivism) does not deny the reality of non-measurable phenomena, only that those phenomena should not be adequate to scientific investigation. Moreover, positivism, as a philosophical basis for the scientific method, is not consensual or even dominant in the scientific community (see philosophy of science).

Recent developments and discussions around antiscience attitudes reveal how deeply intertwined these beliefs are with social, political, and psychological factors. A study published by Ohio State News on July 11, 2022, identified four primary bases that underpin antiscience beliefs: doubts about the credibility of scientific sources, identification with groups holding antiscience attitudes, conflicts between scientific messages and personal beliefs, and discrepancies between the presentation of scientific messages and individuals' thinking styles. These factors are exacerbated in the current political climate, where ideology significantly influences people's acceptance of science, particularly on topics that have become politically polarized, such as vaccines and climate change. The politicization of science poses a significant challenge to public health and safety, particularly in managing global crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.

The following quotes explore this aspect of four major areas of antiscience: philosophy, sociology, ecology and political.

Philosophy

Philosophical objections against science are often objections about the role of reductionism. For example, in the field of psychology, "both reductionists and antireductionists accept that... non-molecular explanations may not be improved, corrected or grounded in molecular ones". Further, "epistemological antireductionism holds that, given our finite mental capacities, we would not be able to grasp the ultimate physical explanation of many complex phenomena even if we knew the laws governing their ultimate constituents". Some see antiscience as "common...in academic settings...many people see that there are problems in demarcation between science, scientism, and pseudoscience resulting in an antiscience stance. Some argue that nothing can be known for sure".

Many philosophers are "divided as to whether reduction should be a central strategy for understanding the world". However, many agree that "there are, nevertheless, reasons why we want science to discover properties and explanations other than reductive physical ones". Such issues stem "from an antireductionist worry that there is no absolute conception of reality, that is, a characterization of reality such as... science claims to provide".

Sociology

Sociologist Thomas Gieryn refers to "some sociologists who might appear to be antiscience". Some "philosophers and antiscience types", he contends, may have presented "unreal images of science that threaten the believability of scientific knowledge", or appear to have gone "too far in their antiscience deconstructions". The question often lies in how much scientists conform to the standard ideal of "communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, originality, and... skepticism". "scientists don't always conform... scientists do get passionate about pet theories; they do rely on reputation in judging a scientist's work; they do pursue fame and gain via research". Thus, they may show inherent biases in their work. "[Many] scientists are not as rational and logical as the legend would have them, nor are they as illogical or irrational as some relativists might say".

Ecology and health sphere

Within the ecological and health spheres, Levins identifies a conflict "not between science and antiscience, but rather between different pathways for science and technology; between a commodified science-for-profit and a gentle science for humane goals; between the sciences of the smallest parts and the sciences of dynamic wholes... [he] offers proposals for a more holistic, integral approach to understanding and addressing environmental issues". These beliefs are also common within the scientific community, with for example, scientists being prominent in environmental campaigns warning of environmental dangers such as ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect. In the medical sphere, patients and practitioners may choose to reject science and adopt a pseudoscientific approach to health problems. This can be both a practical and a conceptual shift and has attracted strong criticism: "therapeutic touch, a healing technique based upon the laying-on of hands, has found wide acceptance in the nursing profession despite its lack of scientific plausibility. Its acceptance is indicative of a broad antiscientific trend in nursing".

Glazer also criticises the therapists and patients, "for abandoning the biological underpinnings of nursing and for misreading philosophy in the service of an antiscientific world-view". In contrast, Brian Martin criticized Gross and Levitt by saying that "[their] basic approach is to attack constructivists for not being positivists," and that science is "presented as a unitary object, usually identified with scientific knowledge. It is portrayed as neutral and objective. Second, science is claimed to be under attack by 'antiscience' which is composed essentially of ideologues who are threats to the neutrality and objectivity that are fundamental to science. Third, a highly selective attack is made on the arguments of 'antiscience'". Such people allegedly then "routinely equate critique of scientific knowledge with hostility to science, a jump that is logically unsupportable and empirically dubious". Having then "constructed two artificial entities, a unitary 'science' and a unitary 'academic left', each reduced to epistemological essences, Gross and Levitt proceed to attack. They pick out figures in each of several areas – science studies, postmodernism, feminism, environmentalism, AIDS activism – and criticise their critiques of science".

The writings of Young serve to illustrate more antiscientific views: "The strength of the antiscience movement and of alternative technology is that their advocates have managed to retain Utopian vision while still trying to create concrete instances of it". "The real social, ideological and economic forces shaping science...[have] been opposed to the point of suppression in many quarters. Most scientists hate it and label it 'antiscience'. But it is urgently needed, because it makes science self-conscious and hopefully self-critical and accountable with respect to the forces which shape research priorities, criteria, goals".

Genetically modified foods also bring about antiscience sentiment. The general public has recently become more aware of the dangers of a poor diet, as there have been numerous studies that show that the two are inextricably linked. Anti-science dictates that science is untrustworthy, because it is never complete and always being revised, which would be a probable cause for the fear that the general public has of genetically modified foods despite scientific reassurance that such foods are safe.

Antivaccinationists rely on whatever comes to hand presenting some of their arguments as if scientific; however, a strain of antiscience is part of their approach.

Political

Political scientist Tom Nichols, from Harvard Extension School and the U.S. Naval War College, points out that skepticism towards scientific expertise has increasingly become a symbol of political identity, especially within conservative circles. This skepticism is not just a result of misinformation but also reflects a broader cultural shift towards diminishing trust in experts and authoritative sources. This trend challenges the traditional neutrality of science, positioning scientific beliefs and facts within the contentious arena of political ideology.

The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, conflicting responses to public health measures and vaccine acceptance have highlighted the extent to which science has been politicized. Such polarization suggests that for some, rejecting scientific consensus or public health guidance serves as an expression of political allegiance or skepticism towards perceived authority figures.

This politicization of science complicates efforts to address public health crises and undermines the broader social contract that underpins scientific research and its application for the public good. The challenge lies not only in combating misinformation but also in bridging ideological divides that affect public trust in science. Strategies to counteract antiscience attitudes may need to encompass more than just presenting factual information; they might also need to engage with the underlying social and psychological factors that contribute to these attitudes, fostering dialogue that acknowledges different viewpoints and seeks common ground.

Antiscience media

Major antiscience media include portals Natural News, Global Revolution TV, TruthWiki.org, TheAntiMedia.org and GoodGopher. Antiscience views have also been supported on social media by organizations known to support fake news such as the web brigades.

Superdeterminism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism 

In quantum mechanics, superdeterminism is a loophole in Bell's theorem. By postulating that all systems being measured are correlated with the choices of which measurements to make on them, the assumptions of the theorem are no longer fulfilled. A hidden variables theory which is superdeterministic can thus fulfill Bell's notion of local causality and still violate the inequalities derived from Bell's theorem. This makes it possible to construct a local hidden-variable theory that reproduces the predictions of quantum mechanics, for which a few toy models have been proposed. In addition to being deterministic, superdeterministic models also postulate correlations between the state that is measured and the measurement setting.

Overview

Bell's theorem assumes that the measurements performed at each detector can be chosen independently of each other and of the hidden variables that determine the measurement outcome. This relation is often referred to as measurement independence or statistical independence. In a superdeterministic theory this relation is not fulfilled; the hidden variables are necessarily correlated with the measurement setting. Since the choice of measurements and the hidden variable are predetermined, the results at one detector can depend on which measurement is done at the other without any need for information to travel faster than the speed of light. The assumption of statistical independence is sometimes referred to as the free choice or free will assumption, since its negation implies that human experimentalists are not free to choose which measurement to perform.

It is possible to test restricted versions of superdeterminism that posit that the correlations between the hidden variables and the choice of measurement have been established in the recent past. In general, though, superdeterminism is fundamentally untestable, as the correlations can be postulated to exist since the Big Bang, making the loophole impossible to eliminate.

A hypothetical depiction of superdeterminism in which photons from the distant galaxies Sb and Sc are used to control the orientation of the polarization detectors α and β just prior to the arrival of entangled photons Alice and Bob

In the 1980s, John Stewart Bell discussed superdeterminism in a BBC interview:

There is a way to escape the inference of superluminal speeds and spooky action at a distance. But it involves absolute determinism in the universe, the complete absence of free will. Suppose the world is super-deterministic, with not just inanimate nature running on behind-the-scenes clockwork, but with our behavior, including our belief that we are free to choose to do one experiment rather than another, absolutely predetermined, including the "decision" by the experimenter to carry out one set of measurements rather than another, the difficulty disappears. There is no need for a faster than light signal to tell particle A what measurement has been carried out on particle B, because the universe, including particle A, already "knows" what that measurement, and its outcome, will be.

Although he acknowledged the loophole, he also argued that it was implausible. Even if the measurements performed are chosen by deterministic random number generators, the choices can be assumed to be "effectively free for the purpose at hand," because the machine's choice is altered by a large number of very small effects. It is unlikely for the hidden variable to be sensitive to all of the same small influences that the random number generator was.

Nobel Prize in Physics winner Gerard 't Hooft discussed this loophole with John Bell in the early 1980s:

I raised the question: Suppose that also Alice's and Bob's decisions have to be seen as not coming out of free will, but being determined by everything in the theory. John said, well, you know, that I have to exclude. If it's possible, then what I said doesn't apply. I said, Alice and Bob are making a decision out of a cause. A cause lies in their past and has to be included in the picture".

According to the physicist Anton Zeilinger, if superdeterminism is true, some of its implications would bring into question the value of science itself by destroying falsifiability:

[W]e always implicitly assume the freedom of the experimentalist... This fundamental assumption is essential to doing science. If this were not true, then, I suggest, it would make no sense at all to ask nature questions in an experiment, since then nature could determine what our questions are, and that could guide our questions such that we arrive at a false picture of nature.

Physicists Sabine Hossenfelder and Tim Palmer have argued that superdeterminism "is a promising approach not only to solve the measurement problem, but also to understand the apparent non-locality of quantum physics".

Howard M. Wiseman and Eric Cavalcanti argue that any hypothetical superdeterministic theory "would be about as plausible, and appealing, as belief in ubiquitous alien mind-control".

Examples

The first superdeterministic hidden variables model was put forward by Carl H. Brans in 1988. Other models were proposed in 2010 by Michael Hall, and in 2022 by Donadi and Hossenfelder. Gerard 't Hooft has referred to his cellular automaton model of quantum mechanics as superdeterministic though it has remained unclear whether it fulfills the definition.

Some authors consider retrocausality in quantum mechanics to be an example of superdeterminism, whereas other authors treat the two cases as distinct. No agreed-upon definition for distinguishing them exists.